Welcome!

I’m an associate professor of Communication (and, by courtesy, Sociology), Richard E. Guggenheim Faculty Fellow, and Senior HAI Fellow at Stanford University.

My work examines the social impact of algorithms and AI. I pursue this research program through ethnographic studies of professional sites transformed by computation and automation: journalism, criminal justice, computing ethics, and social media.

My award-winning book, Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms (Princeton University Press, 2020) focused on journalism, analyzing the effects of web analytics in U.S. and French newsrooms. It showed how American and French journalists made sense of traffic numbers in different ways, which shaped news production in the two countries.

In a different project, I analyzed the reception of predictive algorithms in U.S. criminal courts, building on previous work on criminal sentencing in French courts. I also studied the implementation of AI ethics, examining the contradictions shaping the work of “ethics entrepreneurs” in technology companies.

My current book, Dreamers, Workers, Gurus, Hucksters: How Influencers Reshaped Social Media, examines content creators on social media platforms. Drawing on case studies ranging from drama channels to “dad” influencers and influencer marketers, it shows how platforms and brands reproduce precarity and inequality in social media careers, while nudging influencers toward inflammatory drama and problematic content. I discussed it in the Ethnography Atelier podcast.

At Stanford I lead the Technology, Culture, and Power Speaker Series, a monthly gathering on the interactions of digital technologies, culture, and inequality.

I received my PhD in Sociology from Princeton University and the EHESS (Paris).  I’m a co-editor of the Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology at Princeton University Press.

I am not accepting new PhD students, MA students, or Honors advisees at this point. I am also unable to serve on new external committees until Spring 2026.

Last but not least: if you wonder how to pronounce my first name (people often do), the Belgian singer Angèle does it really well here.

Selected publications:

“Internal Fractures: The Competing Logics of Social Media Platforms.” Social Media + Society 10(3) (with M. S. Bernstein, J. T. Hancock, C. Jia., M. N. Mado, J. L. Tsai, and C. Xu)

“Walking the Walk of AI Ethics: Organizational Challenges and the Individualization of Risk among Ethics Entrepreneurs.” 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’23), June 12–15, 2023, Chicago, IL, USA (with S. Ali, A. Smart, and R. Katila)

“The Influencer Pay Gap: Platform Labor Meets Racial Capitalism.” New Media & Society: 1-24 (with Y. Lu)

“The Drama of Metrics: Status, Spectacle, and Resistance Among YouTube Drama Creators.” Social Media + Society: 1:14 (with R. Lewis)

“The Ethnographer and the Algorithm: Beyond the Black Box.” Theory & Society. Online First, 1-22.

“Technologies of Crime Prediction: The Reception of Algorithms in Policing and Criminal Courts,” Social Problems Online First 1-17 (with S. Brayne)

“Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control” Academy of Management Annals 14(1): 366-410. (with K. Kellogg and M. Valentine)

“Counting Clicks: Quantification and Variation in Web Journalism in the United States and France.” American Journal of Sociology 123 (5): 1382-1415.

“Algorithms in Practice: Comparing Web Journalism and Criminal Justice.” Big Data & Society 4 (2): 1-14.